Sounds like a wonderful advance. Perhaps a little paranoia might creep in as in ‘This is exactly how the Borg got started’ but it’s not, not really. All those Borg enhancements came after they were linked into a hive mind so could not object, and the Borg would drill out a perfectly good eye to install an electronic one, and cut off a perfectly good arm to attach a Swiss Army arm with loads of gadgets.

So no, that artificial hand is not the Borg becoming reality. In fact, a friend who has already lost a finger on each hand to something hereditary known as ‘Viking disease’, and who might lose more, would benefit enormously from a pair of these.

No, to develop the Borg you first have to connect everyone’s brain so thoroughly that independent thought becomes impossible. If you think of something, the entire hive knows it. That will naturally develop into a single mind and individual people will be no more important than the hairs that you trim, pluck or shave every morning. The loss of some cells does not affect the whole mind. In fact, the whole mind might decide that apoptosis of some of its cells might be a good thing.

Grafting on a robot hand doesn’t do that, not even when the hand is wired directly into the nervous system. It doesn’t affect individuality at all.

All you get is the abstract unless you want to pay for the full paper, but the abstract is quite scary enough. Put that with the robot hand grafted into your nervous system (therefore wiring into the nervous system can already be done) and you have a communist/eugenecist wet dream. Every mind connected, everyone finally absolutely equal, no differentiation at all. No more ‘self’, everyone is expendable for the good of the whole.

Sound good? Well, those Borg on Star Trek were a very good prediction of where such a path leads. They do not invent nor do they innovate. They have no concepts of enjoyment or relaxation. They do their job and then they recharge so they can do it again. They create nothing. All they do is assimilate the inventions of other species, then assimilate the species. Once assimilated, the species invents nothing more. The Borg themselves are stagnant and blank. They offer nothing.

If there are too many to sustain, a group of them will self-terminate. It doesn’t matter which ones because they are all the same. The important parts (the implants) are recycled, the body destroyed and forgotten.

It’s what the Greens want for us, what the Medicals want, what the Righteous want, what all those worldwide groups want. A perfectly controlled population that is incapable of stepping out of line. A population whose size can be controlled with a simple instruction. Who will work and work and ask for nothing.

What they missed though, is that there was only one Borg queen in the story. Every one of those wishing for this world think they will be that Borg queen.

Set me thinking about a TV programme I saw back in the 80’s.
It used Transputers (whatever happened to them?) in a parallel processing system.
They gave it the ‘simple’ task of learning to repeat a spoken sentence.
The only programming involved was for it to generate a random sound, check it against the sentence waveform, and if that bit matched then save it, if not discard it.
Repeat until all the self generated sounds match the original sentence.

Well they left it running overnight and in the morning the result was quite eerie.
It sounded just like a baby learning to speak!!!

Mostly gobbledegook, but with a hint of coherance about it.
I am convinced, if they had left it running for a week, it would have been successful.
Strangely enough that program has never been repeated or the final results shown.

In any case I think the theory of how people learn to speak (sensible, repeated, trial and error, until it sounds right) must be pretty close.
They are probably training a Borg in some lab somewhere as we speak.

“Mostly gobbledegook, but with a hint of coherance about it.” and “Strangely enough that program has never been repeated or the final results shown.” Spend a little time reading the comments under the articles on the MSM sites and one begins to wonder.

As with most technology, this has the potential for huge gains and horrible misapplication. So an independent set of technological enhancements could be awesome. How about a hard drive memory so you would never forget anything ever again? Enhanced vision, enhanced strength, the personal automation of repeat tasks etc.

Just make sure the wifi and the GPS are turned off and the bluetooth doesn’t function so it stays independent because false memory creation for example would be more or less total control of a subject populace.

See the games Deus Ex 1 through 3 for a vision of this future. A chip that can translate a brain signal to an electronic signal and back again would be a serious game changer. There would be a massive number of uses, both good and bad.

It’ll be interesting to see how our would be masters will react to this. Will they let it become a problem first and propose the solution or try and control it from the start so we don’t get any ideas of using it against them?

But of course as with all new technologies all the problems it could cause are totally unforeseeable and couldn’t be predicted at all and that’s way you all need to be monitored / licensed / subjugated / demonised / and finally murdered…unless you’re important and wealthy.

There is an excellent book called “The Third Millennium” that I bought a good 25 years back which is a history of the world from 2000-3000AD.

It’s highly illustrated – impressive given it’s before photoshop – and he got a lot wrong because he didn’t foresee the fall of the USSR, but the section on bionic enhancement is wonderfully covered and seems to be coming to pass.

Is it my age? The fact I am nekulturny and proud? Or the fact I keep missing the bus because the driver always pulls off just as I reach the stop, after a hundred yard dash which is measured in decades rather than seconds?

My second thought? If this is what is being published, what are the ‘black’ military researchers getting up to by now? (Universal Soldier anyone?)